Fury - Salman Rushdie

While this is the  fifth book I "read"  of the author, it is the first time I've tried an audio book medium with him. Read by the author himself in his somewhat hoarse voice, I had to go through the book twice, to get a reasonable comprehension of the book, due to a couple of reasons.

This is his first American novel. Written in 2000/2001, and published weeks before 9/11. It has many a reading of the American way of life, as well as some auto-biographical inferences of the author's own life at that point of time. The main character, Malik Solanka,  a Cambridge man, a multi-millionaire in his second career, escapes to the U.S., leaving his wife and child in London. America brings Solanka its rich life, cult murders and its music - there is reference to Bruce Springsteen concerts and at least two tracks - 41 shots which was only a live version at the time the book was written ( it later appeared in "High Hopes" - 2014 ), and the much older, stellar, I'm on fire. Done with dolls, the success of which he cannot come to terms with, he starts off on a second career with cyber puppets - the new characters go off on a tangent of its own, and later the two coincide. Rushdie attempts to show that a masked reality, a copy of you, is possibly better at dealing with the American life in the year 2000. New York ! The City is boiled with money !

"limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees, the latest anti-virus software, escort services featuring contortionists and twins, video installations, outsider art, featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats."

As I found out from the previous work I read of him, a Rushdie novel is many layered work, with the fabric inter-woven. There are several stories  running almost in parallel, a cultural reading, a cultural criticism and in this case, a virtual world of puppets which has more than a semblance of Solanka, and his friends - and foes. All this makes for a challenging read, and honestly not as rewarding as in the previous instances ( i.e. The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children ). One can't help but awe at Rushdie when one realises how updated he was back then. He was talking of replication, mirroring  and spawning back in 2001 in web space. Yet, as a whole am not convinced that this novel came up a winner. Rushdie may have bitten off  too much here for a single mouthful - a first American novel, I suspect. after a while the reader cannot help but wonder, why does he have to go to that length to stress the debacles of the new century, and money rich but ailing US. Plus, the book mayn't have received the critical attention it would've received, due to the soon to follow 09/11 incidents - a sobering effect if ever there was one. And Springsteen wrote a whole album of songs on "Rising" from the ashes.

As far as am aware there are at least two more Rushdie novels based on America  - The Golden House ( which is likely to receive the audio book treatment from me ) and this year's Booker short listed ( fingers crossed ) Quichotte. I really do hope that Mr. Rushdie will be at least as good as he was in the books mentioned previously, in either of these two books. For now, I can only say, this book only deserves a patient audio book listen if you have some spare time.